Public awareness campaigns targeting human trafficking can be messy and imperfect, but we also see positive examples grounded in respect and lived experiences rather than in rescue attempts by self-appointed saviours.

Anyone who works
as an activist knows that campaigning is a messy job. That is the nature of our
work. Are there human trafficking awareness campaigns that perpetuate harmful
misinformation and stereotypes? Absolutely. But there are also campaigns grounded
in the lived experiences of those directly affected, tied to tangible advocacy,
and effective in changing public perception. The issue is not with campaigning
as a medium for meaningful change, but instead with problematic representation,
assumptions, and processes behind it.

As
campaigners we must not reinforce preconceived notions of human
trafficking and what a typical victim looks like.

Many of these problems
are tied Teju Cole’s ‘white saviour complex’, the belief that one can – or should – parachute into
the global south and save victims of human trafficking in a unidirectional,
foreign, benevolent act of rescue. While this overwhelmingly takes the form of
the white saviour, the truth is that people of all races can be guilty of patronising
actions derived from a position of privilege. Thus, when asking if a public
awareness campaign is effective, we must ask: “is the change we seek contingent
on public action?” If we answer yes, then “is the public taking action out of
pity or out of respect for those affected?”

More than one audience and more than one
problem

When we speak of
public awareness campaigns, we often fail to recognise that the public is not a
monolithic, homogenous mass. Rather, it is comprised of diverse demographics
with varying levels of knowledge of trafficking, and who are motivated by
different arguments and approaches. One person may be moved by appeals to human
rights, another by a corporate social responsibility stance, and others by
religious beliefs. Too often, ineffective campaigns struggle to move beyond one
type of argument and, in turn, end up either alienating certain audiences or
missing them all together. Moreover, human trafficking awareness campaigns have been historically
uneven in their coverage of the different forms of trafficking, with most
campaigns focusing solely on women and girls who are trafficked for sexual
exploitation.

This narrow focus
creates a hierarchy, wherein some forms of trafficking are worse than others. Some
research has shown that
campaigns reflecting this hierarchy can decrease blame towards victims of
trafficking for sexual exploitation but increase blame towards victims of labour
trafficking. This makes it more challenging to talk about overlooked issues
like the trafficking of men and boys for sexual exploitation, the exploitation
of women labourers in the seafood and palm oil industries, or how transgender
people are impacted by trafficking. As campaigners, we must focus on forms of engagement
that teach people to think – not reinforce their preconceived notions about
human trafficking and what a typical victim looks like.

Countering the saviour mentality and oversimplification

The saviour complex
stands in contrast to a grounded understanding of trafficking and its
intersections with race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, religion, and gender.
Campaigns targeting human trafficking continue to be plagued by models
introduced by western saviours who lack understanding of and respect for the global
south, resulting in imagery depicting people of colour in chains, mute, unable
to speak for themselves or to speak back. The saviour complex thrives when
communities can’t represent themselves effectively.

So how can we
encourage the public to counter the saviour mentality? For one, it is essential
to be reflexive and look at who has the power to speak. Organisations based in
the global north but who campaign in the global south need to recognise the
historical imbalance of power and that campaigning must not be a one way street.
It has to be about placing the voices of those who are directly affected – such
as migrant workers, people of colour, domestic workers – at the centre of a
campaign from start to finish. At the same time, we must capture the diversity
of local viewpoints and not romanticise the global south as a single or uniform
community.

Secondly, as Sameera
Hafiz rightly notes, human trafficking is at the “extreme end of a
continuum of labour exploitation”, but that does not mean it is the only issue
at hand. We should see human trafficking as an entry point that allows us to
talk about a wider range of related abuses rather than using as a threshold for
victimhood. In the case of domestic work in particular, this framing illuminates
intersecting abuses and manifestations of labour exploitation, misogyny, and
xenophobia which, when compounded, can result in human trafficking.

Translating theory into practice

As Walk Free’s former campaigner in
southeast Asia, I aimed to counter the saviour dynamic by re-centring local
knowledge. Specifically, in partnership with the Indonesian NGO Migrant CARE, we designed a bilingual
campaign to prioritise the domestic workers’ bill that was making its way
through the Indonesian parliament. Up until this point abuse of domestic
workers was assumed by many to affect only those who migrated abroad, and
without a law enshrining their rights they had no protection against extreme
forms of labour abuse taking place within Indonesia’s borders.

To correct public
misperceptions we launched video interviews with domestic workers, employers,
members of the public, and a representative of parliament. All confirmed the
need to recognise domestic work as formal work. By raising awareness of the problem
we hoped more people would mobilise around it and pressure parliament to act. Here,
awareness and advocacy go hand in hand.

A screenshot from an interview with a
domestic worker. In this frame
she says in Indonesian, “Kaya pekerja rumah tangga dianggap sebelah mata.”

By setting the
tone that domestic workers could speak to their lived reality, we hoped that
followers signed our petition not because they felt sorry for or wanted to ‘save’
these women, but because they respected them and supported their fight for justice.
In the end we collected over 28,000 signatures
supporting the domestic workers’ bill from people in Indonesia as well as
elsewhere around the globe, from Guyana to Qatar, Nigeria, and Nepal.

In the end, we
delivered the petition to the head of parliament’s labour commission. The bill
was subsequently prioritised but has not yet passed. Despite this final hurdle,
I would argue that this campaign is nonetheless an important step in the right
direction.

Open doors

At IOM X, we want domestic workers to know
their rights, governments to ratify the ILO’s Domestic
Worker Convention (No. 189), and recruiters to stop exploiting workers. But
individual employers also have their own role to play, especially because of
uneven power dynamics in the private sphere of the home. Recognising this, we
created ‘Open
Doors’, a 3-part short film series on the complex challenges
experienced by migrant domestic workers and
their employers in several different countries.

Screenshot from Open
Doors: Singapore in which the employer’s child witnesses abuse of the
domestic worker.

The background
research and design for this project was comprised of in-depth interviews and
focus group discussions with those personally impacted: domestic workers and
employers. Each video reflects their suggestions: highlighting the problem of
employers withholding passports, debts to recruiters, how children learn from
abusive parents, and the need for a day off.

They model
positive behaviours that employers can adopt and stress that these practices
are essential to creating a respectful and professional environment. Impact
assessments saw that more than half of viewers in Thailand learned something
new and would talk to another person about domestic workers’ rights, and all
three videos saw an increase in positive attitudes towards domestic workers.

This isn’t to say Open Doors was perfect. In one
country, for example, viewer surveys revealed that employers of local domestic
workers were less likely than employers of foreign domestic workers to respect
their labour rights. Still, as one Indonesian viewer told us, we can’t just
focus on abuse. Stories of respect and professionalism between employers and
domestic workers also need to be told in order to highlight a positive
alternative. Notably, Open Doors never uses the word ‘trafficking’, but instead
depicts the root attitudes and behaviours that then enable it to happen.

The (messy) journey ahead

As an
anthropologist and activist, I’ve realised that it is easy to problematise campaigns
and organisations as an outsider looking in, but it is much harder to
acknowledge these criticisms and take them into account when designing and
executing a campaign. Many of us campaigners are cognisant of these critiques,
but we look to them as feedback for improvement rather than a source of immobilisation.
The truth is that public awareness campaigns will continue to exist, so we must
learn to fix them and accept that this will be a messy, imperfect journey.

Awareness
campaigns can – and do – change perceptions and encourage acts that mobilise public
pressure and pave the way for major changes. While some campaigns suffer from
various entanglements with the saviour complex, this is by no means true of all
campaigns. Members of the public are rarely going to be the ones drafting a new
government labour law, writing a company policy on respecting labour unions in
supply chains, or even helping NGOs reintegrate victims of trafficking into
society – but they can make these things priorities for those who will.

About the author

Jamison Liang is a digital programme officer at IOM X, a regional human trafficking awareness campaign in Southeast Asia. The views expressed are the author’s and do not represent those of IOM X and USAID.

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